John Updike, Tireless Chronicler of Small-Town America, Dies at 76

John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels highlighted so vast and protean a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism as to place him in the first rank of American men of letters, died on Tuesday. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher. A spokesman said Mr. Updike died at a hospice outside Boston.

Of Mr. Updike’s 61 books, perhaps none captured the imagination of the book-reading public as those about ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings. His best-known protagonist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, first appears as a former high-school basketball star trapped in a loveless marriage and a sales job he hates. Through the four novels whose titles bear his nickname — “Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” — the author traces the sad life of this undistinguished middle-American against the background of the last half-century’s major events.

“My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class,” Mr. Updike told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine. “I like middles,” he continued. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

From his earliest short stories, set in the fictional town of Olinger, Pa., which he once described as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid,” Mr. Updike sought the clash of extremes in everyday dramas of marriage, sex and divorce. The only wealth he bestowed on his subjects lay in the richness of his descriptive language, the detailed fineness of which won him comparisons with painters like Vermeer and Andrew Wyeth.

This detail was often so rich that it inspired two schools of thought on Mr. Updike’s fiction — those who responded to his descriptive prose as to a kind of poetry, a sensuous engagement with the world, and those who argued that he wasted beautiful language on nothing. The latter position was perhaps most acutely defined by James Wood in an essay, “John Updike’s Complacent God,” in his collection “The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief” (Random House, 1999).

Mr. Wood attributed the author’s “lyric capacities” to his “particular loyalty to the Protestant theologian Karl Barth.” He argued that for Mr. Updike, because he accepts Barth’s belief that God confers grace through the gift of creation, description alone of that creation is sufficient to affirm his faith.

But description may not be enough for readers who don’t share Mr. Updike’s faith, Mr. Wood suggests. “He is a prose writer of great beauty,” Mr. Wood wrote, “but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey.”

Comments like these did not deter Mr. Updike from plowing ahead with his work, turning out three pages a day of fiction, essays, criticism or verse, and proving the maxim that several pages a day was at least a book a year and would add up to many dozens of books in a lifetime.

“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”

His essays and criticism alone filled more than a dozen volumes, and ranged from “Golf Dreams: Writings on Art” (1996) to “Just Looking: Essays on Art” (1989) and “Still Looking: Essays on American Art” (2005) to “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs” (1989) to his famous piece on the baseball star Ted Williams’s last game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1977), which first appeared in The New Yorker on Oct. 22, 1960.

While his vast output of poetry tended toward light verse, in “Midpoint and Other Poems” (1969), the title work undertakes a self-examination at age 35, comically combining a homage to past great poets, autobiography and experimental typography in what the author called “a joke on the antique genre of the long poem.”

Born laughing, I’ve believed in the absurd,Which brought me this far; henceforth, if I can,I must impersonate a serious man.

As his fiction matured, Mr. Updike’s prose grew leaner and more muscular, and his novels waxed more exotic in form, locale and subject matter, especially in “The Coup” (1978), set in an imaginary African country; “Brazil” (1994), a venture in magic realism; “Toward the End of Time” (1997), whose story occurs in 2020, following a war between the United States and China; “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000), about Hamlet’s mother and uncle, and “The Terrorist” (2006), a fictional study of a convert to Islam who tries to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.

Then there were the short stories, which he turned out by the several hundreds, most of them first appearing in The New Yorker.

It was here, at this length, that he exercised his exquisitely sharp eye for the minutiae of domestic routine and the conflicts that animated it for him — between present satisfaction and future possibility, between sex and spirituality, and between the beauty of creation and the looming threat of death, which he summed up famously in the concluding sentence of “Pigeon Feathers,” the title story of his second collection (1962).

The story is about a boy, David, who is forced to shoot some pigeons in a barn, and then watches, fascinated, as their feathers float to the ground: “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pa., and grew up in the nearby town of Shillington. The only child of Wesley Russell Updike, a junior high school math teacher of German descent, and Linda Grace (Hoyer) Updike, an aspiring writer, he lived a solitary childhood made more so by his family’s move when he was 13 to his mother’s birthplace on an 80-acre farm near Plowville, Pa. From there both he and his father had to commute the 11 miles to school in town, but the isolation fired the boy’s imagination as well as his desire to take flight from aloneness.

Sustained by hours of reading in the local library and by his mother’s encouragement to write, he aspired first to be either a Walt Disney animator or a magazine cartoonist. But a sense of narrative was implanted early and most likely nurtured by summer work as a copyboy for a local newspaper, The Reading Eagle, for which he eventually wrote several features.

As he told The Paris Review, “In a sense my mother and father, considerable actors both, were dramatizing my youth as I was having it so that I arrived as an adult with some burden of material already half formed.”

After graduating from high school as co-valedictorian and senior-class president, Mr. Updike attended Harvard College on a scholarship. Although he majored in English and wrote for and edited The Harvard Lampoon, he continued his cartooning. In 1953 he married Mary Entwistle Pennington, a Radcliffe fine arts major.

Graduating from Harvard in 1954 summa cum laude, he won a Knox Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford. In June of that year, his short story “Friends from Philadelphia” was accepted, along with a poem, by The New Yorker. It was an event, he later told The Paris Review, that remained “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.”

Following the birth of his first child, Elizabeth Pennington, the couple returned to America, and Mr. Updike went to work writing Talk of the Town pieces for The New Yorker.

Two years later, with the arrival of a second child, David Hoyer, the couple, needing more space, moved to Ipswich, Mass., an hour north of Boston, where Mr. Updike kept his ties to The New Yorker but concentrated on his poetry and fiction. In 1959, his third child, Michael John, was born, followed the next year by a fourth, Miranda Margaret.

The move proved creatively invigorating as well. By 1959 he had completed three books — a volume of poetry, “The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures,” a novel, “The Poorhouse Fair” and a collection of stories, “The Same Door” — and placed them with Knopf, which would remain his publisher throughout his prolific career.

From 1954 to 1959, he published more than a hundred pieces in The New Yorker: essays, articles, poems and short stories. ("No writer was more important to the soul of The New Yorker than John," David Remnick, the editor of the magazine, said on Tuesday.) More important, the move to a small town seemed to stimulate his memories of Shillington and his creation of its fictional counterpart, Ollington. All his early stories were set there, as well as three of his first four novels, “The Poorhouse Fair,” “The Centaur” and “Of the Farm,” excepting only “Rabbit, Run” (1960), which was set in another small Pennsylvania town.

“I really don’t think I’m alone among writers in caring about what they experienced in the first 18 years of their life,” he told The Paris Review. “Nothing that happens to us after 20 is as free from self-consciousness, because by then we have the vocation to write,” he continued. “At the point where you get your writerly vocation, you diminish your receptivity to experience.”

“The Poorhouse Fair” (1959), avoiding the usual coming-of-age tale of most beginners, established Mr. Updike’s reputation as an important novelist. Based on an old people’s home near Shillington, the novel explores the homogenization of society among members of the author’s grandfather’s generation. It won the Rosenthal Foundation Award.

“The Centaur” (1963), more autobiographical, welds the Greek myth of Chiron, the wounded centaur who gives up his immortality for the release of Prometheus, to the story of a mocked Olinger high-school science teacher who sacrifices himself for his son. It won the 1964 National Book Award for fiction.

Photo

John Updike in the Boston Public Library in 2006.Credit
Robert Spencer for The New York Times

“Of the Farm” (1965), set not far from Olinger, focuses on the mother of a farm family who fears she will die before her son, gone into advertising in New York, will fulfill her dream of his becoming a poet.

Only with “Couples” (1968), his fifth novel, did Mr. Updike move his setting away from Pennsylvania, to the fictional Tarbox, Mass., where he explores sexual coupling and uncoupling in a community of young marrieds. The couple, Wilfrid Sheed wrote in a praising review in The Sunday Times Book Review, “wanted to get away from the staleness of Old America and the vulgarity of the new; who wanted to live beautifully in beautiful surroundings; to raise intelligent children in renovated houses in absolutely authentic rural centers.”

Mr. Sheed concluded that “Updike’s slide-lecture on this crowd skewers them better than any sociological study has done, or could do.”

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With the Rabbit quartet, he launched his keen, all-seeing eye into a still wider world. Where “Rabbit, Run” plays out its present-tense narrative in domestic working-class squalor, its three sequels, published in 10-year intervals, encompass the later 20th-century American experience: “Rabbit Redux” (1971) the cultural turmoil of the 1960’s; “Rabbit Is Rich” (1981) the boom years of the 1970’s, and “Rabbit at Rest” (1991) in the time of what Rabbit calls “Reagan’s reign,” with its trade war with Japan, its AIDS epidemic and the terror bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Rabbit lies dying in a hospital at the end of the last volume, overweight, worn-out, felled by a coronary infarction during a one-on-one basketball game with Tiger, a young black man. (“Tiger stands amazed above the fallen body — the plaid Bermuda shorts, the brand-new walking Nikes, the blue golf shirt with the logo of intertwined V’s.”)

With his life over, critics judged that Rabbit had entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures, to join Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and the like.

“Rabbit Redux” was considered the weakest of the set, but “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” both won Pulitzer Prizes and other awards. Reissued as a set in 1995, “Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy” was pronounced by some to be a contender for the crown of great American novel.

As a small-town businessman of limited scope, Rabbit is obviously very different from his creator. Yet the two of them share a middle-American view of the world, with the difference that Mr. Updike was exquisitely self-conscious. Against the grain of his calling and temperament, he strove, like the German writer Thomas Mann, for a burgherly existence.

As a citizen of Ipswich, he participated in local affairs, serving on the Congregational church building committee and the Democratic town committee and writing a pageant for the town’s Seventeenth-Century Day. Although politically liberal, he was virtually alone among American writers to declare himself in support of the Vietnam War.

He worked downtown, in an office above a restaurant. “I write every weekday morning,” he told The Paris Review. “I write fairly rapidly if I get going, and don’t change much, and have never been one for making outlines or taking out whole paragraphs or agonizing much. If a thing goes, it goes for me, and if it doesn’t, I eventually stop and get off.”

In 1974 he separated from Mary, and moved to Boston, where he taught briefly at Boston University. In 1976 the Updikes were divorced, and the following year he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and her three children first in Georgetown, Mass., and then in 1984 in Beverly Farms, both towns in the same corner of the state as Ipswich.

Along with his widow, his first wife survives him, as well as his sons, David of Cambridge, Mass., and Michael, of Newburyport, Mass; his daughters, Miranda Updike, of Ipswich, Mass., and Elizabeth Cobblah, of Maynard, Mass., and several grandchildren.

With the storehouse of his youthful experience emptying and his material circumstances enriched — “Couples” proved a big bestseller and put its author’s face on the cover of Time magazine — he found the formerly easy flow of his prose diminishing somewhat. Yet determined to publish a book a year, he plodded on.

“Writing’s gotten to be a habit,” he told Michiko Kakutani in an interview for The New York Times in 1982, a year after the publication of “Rabbit Is Rich.” “Sometimes the books do seem kind of silly and very papery, but there are moments when a sentence or a series of sentences clicks.”

Among the dozen or more novels he brought out in the next quarter century, some clicked, like “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984), celebrated as an exuberant sexual comedy and a satirical view of women’s liberation. It was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer.

In his last novel, ”The Widows of Eastwick,” published in October, Mr. Updike returned to the three witches now as widows revisiting the town. Rather than preying on men as they once did, now they are “ordinary women,” Ms. Kakutani wrote in her review, “haunted by the sins of their youth, frightened of the looming prospect of the grave and trying their best to get by, day by day by day.”

But other later Updike novels seemed on the thin and papery side. “Roger’s Version” (1986) and “S” (1988), which formed a trilogy, begun with “A Month of Sundays” (1975), that were three takes on Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”; “Memories of the Ford Administration” (1992), a linking of personal guilt to history; “Seek My Face” (2002), an improvisation on the life of Jackson Pollock, and “Villages” (2004), about small-town adultery: these novels all conveyed a sense of the author going through his talented motions. They also suffered from what Mr. Updike himself described to Ms. Kakutani as the limitations of “my imagination and experience, which are both severely finite.”

Some readers also carped about his portrayal of women. Mr. Updike admitted as much in an interview with The Times in 1988, when he acknowledged the complaint that “my women are never on the move, that they’re always stuck where the men have put them.” His “only defense,” he said, “would be that it’s in the domesticity, the family, the sexual relations, that women interest me. I don’t write about too many male businessmen, and I’m not apt to write about too many female businessmen.”

Yet in purposely trying to rectify this so-called fault by creating what he called “active and dynamic” women in “The Witches of Eastwick” and “S,” he only succeeded in making things worse. What reviewers mostly detected behind the author’s apparent respect for these female dynamos was more his ambivalence than anything else.

Critics also pointed out the lack of violence in Mr. Updike’s plots, which seemed at odds with the contemporary world he was presumably depicting. In response to this charge, he invoked the defense that he wrote out of his experience.

“I have fought in no wars and engaged in few fistfights,” he told The Paris Review. “If, as may be, the holocausts at the rim of possibility do soon visit us, I am confident my capacities for expression can rise, if I live, to the occasion. In the meantime let’s all of us with some access to a printing press not abuse our privilege with fashionable fantasies.”

In the meantime, the essays, book reviews, art criticism, reminiscences, introductions, forewords, prefaces, speeches, travel notes, film commentary, prose sketches, ruminations and other occasional jottings poured forth inexhaustibly, as if the experiences of his five senses only became real once recorded on paper.

The novelist Martin Amis sketched Mr. Updike plausibly in a 1991 review of a collection for The Times Book Review: “Preparing his cup of Sanka over the singing kettle, he wears his usual expression: that of a man beset by an embarrassment of delicious drolleries. The telephone starts ringing. A science magazine wants something pithy on the philosophy of subatomic thermodynamics; a fashion magazine wants 10,000 words on his favorite color. No problem — but can they hang on? Mr. Updike has to go upstairs again and blurt out a novel.”

Over the decades, the assorted nonfiction filled five thick volumes, “Assorted Prose” (1965), “Picked-Up Pieces” (1975), “Hugging the Shore” (1983), “Odd Jobs” (1991) and “More Matter” (1999). The impression they left most indelibly was their author’s vast range in time, space and discipline as a reader, and his deep capacity to understand, appreciate, discriminate, explain and guide. As he once said: “I think it good for an author, baffled by obtuse reviews of himself, to discover what a recalcitrant art reviewing is, how hard it is to keep the plot straight, let alone to sort out one’s honest responses.”

And whatever his flaws as a novelist, his growing mastery of the short-story form continued to define him as a writer. As Anatole Broyard put it in a review for The Times of Mr. Updike’s sixth collection of stories, “Museums and Women and Other Stories” (1972): “His former preciousness has toughened into precision.” He concluded, “His language, which was once like a cat licking its fur, now stays closer to its subject, has become a means instead of an end in itself.”

Not incidentally, it was in a story collection — his fifth, “Bech: A Book” (1970) — that Mr. Updike created in the character Henry Bech a counter-self living a counter-life. Bech is an unmarried, urban, blocked Jewish writer immersed in the swim of literary celebrity, or as Bech himself put it in the third volume devoted to him, “Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel” (1998), following the second, “Bech Is Back” (1982), “a vain, limp leech on the leg of literature as it waded through swampy times.”

As Mr. Updike’s opposite, Henry Bech not only entertained his readers in a voice very different from his creator’s — world-weary, full of schmerz and a touch of schmalz — he also undertook certain tasks that Mr. Updike avoided, like attending literary dinners, tsk-tsking over a younger generation’s minimalist prose and maximal tendency to write memoirs, working off grudges, murdering critics and interviewing John Updike for The New York Times Book Review.

Bech even wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, something Cynthia Ozick once speculated that Mr. Updike had failed to do because, as she wrote in a review of his “Early Stories 1953-1975” (2003), “among contemporary fiction writers” he “is the most rootedly American (though of German, not WASP, stock), and the most self-consciously Protestant.”

She concluded: “The Protestant idea of God ... is not conspicuously the Lord of history. This may be the reason the Nobel literary committee, afloat on the turbulent waves of vast historical grievances, has so far overlooked Updike.”

By contrasting so sharply with his creator, Henry Bech also defined Mr. Updike more distinctly, particularly his determination to stick to the essentials of his craft. As he told The Paris Review about his decision to shun the New York spotlight: “Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”

Correction: September 24, 2010

A headline on an earlier version of this article rendered the writer's surname incorrectly.